The Top 100 Wines of 2003 / Winemaker: Philippe Melka

Mike Weiss

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 7, 2003

Photo: CRAIG LEE

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Winemakers to watch. Photo of Phillipe Melka, consulting winemaker for Quintessa, Ferrari-Carano, Vineyard 29, etc. This photo of Phillipe Melka was taken at Quintessa vineyards in Rutherford. He enjoys surfing and is holding his surfboard.
Event on 10/23/03 in Rutherford.
CRAIG LEE / The Chronicle less

Winemakers to watch. Photo of Phillipe Melka, consulting winemaker for Quintessa, Ferrari-Carano, Vineyard 29, etc. This photo of Phillipe Melka was taken at Quintessa vineyards in Rutherford. He enjoys surfing ... more

Photo: CRAIG LEE

The Top 100 Wines of 2003 / Winemaker: Philippe Melka

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Philippe Melka Age: 38 Winery: Consults for many

Philippe Melka is the million-dollar man. At last summer's Napa Valley Wine Auction, a godawful rich Texan teamed up with the Trinchero family of Sutter Home Winery to bid a million bucks (the money was donated to charity) for Melka's services. The Bordeaux-trained winemaker will make them 300 cases of wine from donated grapes.

Melka is a slight, sunburned Frenchman with a prominent Gallic nose who toots around the Napa and Sonoma valleys in a dusty Volkswagen with a child seat in back. When we talked late in the 2003 harvest season, he was wearing an untucked cranberry T-shirt outside his worn jeans. Beneath his tapered nails, there was earth.

"I love it," he says, laughing about the million-dollar bid. "That was fun." The serious work, though, is in the winery; and because he is of Bordeaux, where winemakers are also farmers, in the vineyard. "Very complicated this year in the winemaking, because it's a year we need to be very focused," he says. "Some years your influence as a winemaker will be much more dramatic. Is not good or bad. It's a difference on the grapes, on the character of the vintage. Sometimes you really need to be a little more, I will say, on the top of it. How to explain that? It is a comparison like with kids. If a kid doesn't follow the rules that doesn't mean they are bad, but you have to be more on top of them."

Melka and his American-born wife Cherie, an enologist, have two children, 7 and 5. Cherie was one reason he emigrated to California in 1994. The second was that there were all these rich people buying vineyards who needed somebody to make their wines. The charming and talented Frenchman saw an opportunity.

"The timing was perfect," Melka says. He opened a consulting business and today makes some of California's most praised wines. Among his clients are Bryant Family, Vineyard 29, Quintessa and Hundred Acre. His specialty is red, Bordeaux-style blends that accomplish the rare trick of being both big and subtle.

"My style, how I'm recognized, is to show through the wine the site. To respect as much as I can the grape. So every single wine I make will be very different, because every one has a unique site. We should emphasize much more the estate than the winemaker.

"You have to minimize as much as you can the technique, the winemaking, if you like. In California, they come up with the star system. That's bothering me a little." Melka's influence has been felt, especially among the smaller estate-size wineries with their complex wines and top-end prices, in a shift of emphasis toward terroir - the French word for every aspect of soil and climate.

As for those 300 cases he will be making for the rich Texans, Tamra and John Gorman, it will be a blend of 90 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 10 percent Cabernet Franc, the grapes donated in half-ton lots from 12 wineries. So far the wine has no name. "Maybe," Melka says, laughing, "Million Dollar Wine? They donate their best stuff. I cannot miss. Otherwise it would be very expensive vinegar."